Former health secretary Jeremy Hunt is calling for schools and borders to close "right away" as he warns the pressures facing hospitals are "off-the -scale worse" than previous winter crises.

The chairman of the Commons Health and Social Care Committee says, while in previous years, elective care has been cancelled in January to protect emergency care that too is now under severe pressure, with "record trolley waits for the very sickest patients".

"Even more worryingly, fewer heart attack patients appear to be presenting in ICUs, perhaps because they are not dialling 999 when they need to," the Conservative MP said on Twitter.

"[The number one] lesson is countries that act early & decisively save lives & get their economies back to normal faster.

"We, therefore, cannot afford to wait: all schools should be closed, international travel stopped, household mixing limited and the tier system reviewed so that the highest tier really does bring down infection levels (as with the first lockdown)," Hunt concluded.